CleverWorkarounds has an insightful post are an South Australian goverment project that’s being scrapped after spending $5 million on IT development. What’s notiable about this is that this reflects how many SharePoint engagements go: projects failing because the approach taken was too complex for proper implementation, and many of the difficulties would have discovered early on with a proof of concept.

Projects fail for a number of reasons, but the main point here was the lack of high level systems thinking. Sometimes, it’s best to figure out ways to simplify the complexity, and that isn’t always an easyr thing to do.

So why is this the perfect time to rethink usability of your applications? Here’s a few reasons.

Most usability changes are small improvements, not drastic changes

If your application or website is surviving and making revenue, but not increasing in revenue the way that you want, this is the prefect time because most changes are small tweaks versus massive redesigns (or, if you are having to do a massive redesign, you’re probably not going to be around much longer anyways).

At a few positions that i’ve worked at, we made changes like this and saw more improvements using less budget than if we had undertaken a large development effort.

Making user experience improvements versus development changes is cheaper

The ratio of time on projects of developers versus user experience architects is about two or three to one, and developers are very expensive. Thus, taking on large-scale projects that may or may not improve your website or web application is a risky proposition, but making changes on a smaller scale where you can measure the results in short, iterative development cycles in much easier to demonstrate to upper management and customers.

Plus with limited resources, you can also cut down the amount of requirements gathering you are doing and have user experience architects work directly with the developers.

User experience changes help keep your current customers happy, and retention is the key to survival in a recession

It’s best to talk to your customers directly (especially the high value clients), and ask them about your service. Put together a survey of five or six simple questions that are open ended, like:

What do you like about the website?

What do you dislike about the website?

How often do you use the website?

Do you use it in conjunction with other services?

What are websites you like?

Interview ten or so customers, and you’ll be surprised at the insights they gave. One of the insights we got from customers at Escrow.com during a time of recession was that they were familar with eBay as an application. As we redesigned the Escrow.com site to fit the eBay style, revenue went up without any marketing spend.

I have a love, hate relationship with blogging — like the promotion I can do with it, don’t like the amount of work it takes sometimes. But a site like ProBlogger is a perfect example of what a blog for business should be.

Darren Rowse is a full-time blogger and runs the site. Most imporatntly, he’s figured out how to make a full time living out of it, and live life on his terms (or the terms of his readers).

This came up at work during a conversation about browser sizes and screen resolution: just what is the usable area of real estate in a browser?

That’s changing a bit with the advent of Google Chrome and minimalist browser user interfaces, but here’s a straight forward chart as compiled at My Own Shit (not kidding about the name), with some of my own notes added:

640 by 480: 618 by 310 actual, 600 by 300 safe

800 by 600: 778 by 430 actual, 770 by 420 safe

1024 by 768: 1004 by 598 actual, 950 by 550 safe

1280 by 1024: 1259 by 853, 1200 by 840 safe

I bolded the most relevant size, but I’m sure that the 1280 size is becoming more and more prevalent. Whatever suze you are designing for, it’s easiest to just think you lose 25 pixels horizontally and 170 pixels vertically, and should size the Photoshop mockup accordingly.

If you have an action on your site that a user can click on, the page should be primarily around that action

Sorry to pick on Technorati — it’s fun — but one of my pet peeves is when I click on Sign In in the top navigation, this is the screen I get. Over in the right corner, small, is a sign in panel for members to use. For people that clicked on Sign In and didn’t realized they have never been a member of Technorati (and mind you, why would someone click on Sign In if they weren’t a member already?), those users get a huge registration screen where they can create an account.

Users who don’t have accounts that didn’t understand what Sign In means would click on it, thinking they would have the ability to Register. Read that again for emphasis, because it’s supposed to be as confusing as it sounds.

The issue is that both Register and Sign In take the user to the same screen. It was probably a conservation of development resources on the part of Technorati, but I would think they could take the extra week to separate the functions. However, front and center is a registration form. Is it to increase user membership? Is it to confuse existing users?

Keep it simple. If it says Sign In, make that the primary action, and provide a link to the registration screen. Of all the functions that we do over and over again, you would think that registration and signing in (and the design patterns around that) would be fairly straightforward.

We’ve been playing with faceted search for use with a few of our clients. It’s a great tool, and I believe it’s a replacement for the overrated and underused Advanced Search (i.e. if there are 200 users using it a month, is it really worth the return on investment?).

However, faceted search requires extra information architecture and meta data planning that most SharePoint Administrators don’t want to do, or don’t know how to do. Again, extra power, but requires extra work and planning; you also have to remember that you really need enough pages (over 5,000) to make it effective for end users.

Local SEO Guide has an awesome post on straight forward strategies about faceted search. And a question, what do you think of replacing faceted search with advanced search?

I know it’s tough, especially if you are looking for a job right now, to carefully select where you want to work next. However, Seth Godin has a great post about the effects of working somewhere that doesn’t fit who you are and what you need to get out of your day job. Even though we aren’t supposed to like work (that’s why it’s not called fun), we spend over a third to a half of our waking hours there.

He made a few really good points that resonate. You should take a job only if:

If makes you better at what you do

If it makes you more marketable

If you can learn something there

The best quote from his article:

Great marketing involves having a great product, and not every job (or every client) is worth your time or attention or love.

I work from home a lot, because the company I work for is a fairly virtual organization and almost has to be because we have clients all over Southern California. It’s definately not for everyone. I’m live alone, so I have to force myself to go out and see the real world sometimes, but a lot of people have family and i.e. potential distractions.

One of the things to remember is just because you work from home, that’s not a license to have the flexibility to leave at any minute of the day. You still have to sit down and concentrate on work.

Barcamp’s pretty cool — it’s one of those unconferences where just about anyone can present on any topic, and I think the most popular presentation last time around was how to make a grilled cheese sandwich (not kidding).

It’s this weekend in Santa Monica, Oct. 25 and 26. I’ll be there on the 25th.

Blogs don’t have to have a ton of content to be relative, and UX Crank is a great example of this. They have a bunch of concise, simple tips to make your User Experience a better place. My favorites are Things That Are Stupid. Note most of them are in Washington D.C.

Rumor has it, the Los Angeles Times is next, and it’s never going to be the same.

The first question you are probably asking is, “Why are you talking about this when this is a site about usability?”

Here’s why: No matter how we slice and dice it, all media influences each other. Radio influences the web on how advertisements are structured for pod casts. Magazine and newspaper style design is making a big comeback in blogs. Newspapers are shifting to more magazine style design. And Magazines look to the web for greatness.

We should stay firmly in the physical world so we can adapt it the virtual one.

Don’t Let Business Needs Get In The Way Of User Needs

Yeah, I know, we all have to make money on this thing, but one of the most annoying things about CNN.com is that the search box is set to default to the web, specifically Google.

But what if I want to search CNN.com?

When it comes to the web, I figure I’m smarter than the average bear, but it took me a couple of tries to figure out what it was doing. and that I had to click on CNN News above the search box to change the search. Not only is the indication of status above the search box weak (the links are bolder than the status), but for the millions of users that use CNN, you would think they would be able to make enough money on advertising not to perform this standard web trick.

This is, in essence, like a porn site: let’s hide the link so we can make some more revenue. Additionally (and I’m going to call Google out on this), this dirties the reputation of both CNN and Google because you and I know this was part of the business deal. Some lawyers got together and figured out a way some extra revenue.

I know this isn’t an isolated case. Another conversation I had with someone that works with an even larger site that also has a deal with Google said that the search engine practically monopolizes search, and in essence, it hurts the user experience of the whole site because of the legal terms of the revenue deal.

User needs should not be adversely affected by business needs, and the user experience of what we see here is affected actually that.

If you are making changes to your site to generate a few extra clicks, you’re in the wrong business. Users see through that, and it will affect your business.

There’s a post over at Knowledge Forward about how SharePoint is not a gap, it’s an ecosystem. It’s true — there are gaps in the platform that allow third party vendors to build all sorts of nifty tools and web parts to fill those gaps. While it’s arguable that those gaps are intentional or not, what it does point it out is that SharePoint is incorrectly positioned as an out-of-the-box cure all for all your content management ills that can be implemented in two weeks exactly as you want.

(That may be part of the reason why there’s so many awful SharePoint implementations.)

MOSS is more of a framework of “Where do you want to go today” without needing to build the system from scratch and requiring money and time to do all that testing on what really should be out-of-the-box compnents.

SharePoint can do a lot of things, and sometimes almost anything, but SharePoint implemented incorrectly can equal months of pain and believe me, I’ve seen it. SharePoint however positions itself very well against the Documentums and Vignettes of the world in providing a solution that provides extensive control over workflow and document management but doesn’t break the bank.

It doesn’t mean it’s any easier to implement; it just means that you probably need three or four MOSS Architects when building a system with Vignette or Documentum might need 10 or more consultants who would cost twice as much per hour.

Here’s a few tips to make your life easier:

What Are You Trying To Do?

Figure it out — what’s the purpose of the SharePoint implementation? There’s a lot of things that it does well, and there’s also a lot of things that it doesn’t do well. SharePoint is excellent at document management, collaboration and other internal intranet needs. It’s blog and message board tools, however, aren’t as effective as they could be. The list might make SharePoint a deal maker or breaker.

List what you need out of any content management solution, and prioritize what’s more versus less important. This will help you evaluate how close SharePoint gets you to the final product.

What Does SharePoint Provide “Almost Out Of The Box”?

There’s a lot of functionality in SharePoint that gets you 90 percent of the way to where you want to be. Figure out what functionality you need out of SharePoint, and look for web parts and configurations that gets you almost all the way there.

If it’s not quite what you need, but close, either consider the time it takes to customize it, or consider changing your requirement so it fits the tool. This may seem like a backwards thing to do things, but if it saves

What Are The Gaps That Need To Be Filled, And How Do I Fill Them?

There are a ton of companies to provide tools that play well with SharePoint, and fill in some of the gaps where SharePoint falls short.

For example:

Telligent has a product called Evolution, which fills in collaboration gaps where SharePoint isn’t as effective as it could be. Evolution is a complete social media package with blogging, message boards and social network components that includes web parts the integrate directly into SharePoint.

Telerik provides a lot of smaller web parts like a totally configurable HTML editor that plugs directly into SharePoint. It comes with a bunch of other tools, but the editor is what sold one of our clients on how much control (or lack thereof) they could give end users editing SharePoint content.

Infragistics also builds presentation layer controls that helps give end users a top notch User Experience in using SharePoint. Remember, some of those gaps aren’t just product-driven, they may be UI Driven.

The hardest part about being a consultant is emphasizing to the client they need strategic thinking when all the client wants you to do is build mockups or design wireframes. “Can’t you just come up with it?” They ask.

Noise Between Stations has some helpful tips that cover talking strategy with your clients, and in effect redefining the relationship.

I like the name, but I love the content of Why Does Everything Suck even more. It’s a straight forward, poke in the eye usability site that sometimes goes off topic, but takes a common sense approach to most things, mostly web-based. Lately, he’s been on a rant about the economy, but who hasn’t?